questions: 1. how do we call up widescreen support so we can maximize the game on our monitors 2. we both are experiencing some video problems which appear to be the same. When running the replay, bomb hits on bases or ground seem to skip panels, and when selecting ships from a list, we get the same hiccups. Is this a common problem in this beta?

When you say you just upgraded, do you mean from an old beta to the newest beta, or do you mean that this is the first time you're installing the beta patch? The fixes may differ quite a bit depending on your answer. If this is your first time upgrading to the beta, then the fixes for what you describe are easy. If you've been playing the beta all along and just this version is giving you problems. then you have bigger issues.

The beta loads in windowed mode. To get it to full screen, just remove the -w from the end of your executable line - this would be located in the red box in the picture. Right click on your beta shortcut to pull up the picture below. If you want to then set your resolution for better widescreen coverage, use the switches as outlined in the What's New file found in your WitPAE folder. If simply taking the game out of windowed mode doesn't make the game run better on your machine, then try out some of the performance switches listed in this same file. There have been a couple of recent threads in tech support about how to use the switches if you want to skip reading the file and read those instead. Here's a link to one of them. http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3337965